


In Your Eyes

by scribblemyname



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canonical Alternate Universe, Developing Relationship, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), new avengers team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2018-04-14 09:30:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4559499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblemyname/pseuds/scribblemyname
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It broke something between them, to acknowledge each other on the field, professional bleeding into personal when Wanda moved to actually talking to him in the halls or common rooms. She wished him a good trip when he headed back to the farm to visit his brother's family. She smiled when he returned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Your Eyes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hanorganaas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hanorganaas/gifts).



> So yada, yada, Age of Ultron does not exist. Okay, no, I guess that's not true. The Barton family doesn't, as his. I'm making them Barney's in this story.
> 
> Thank you to andibeth82, my first reader (remaining mistakes or controversial grammatical choices are all mine), and sorry, delightful recipient that I did not succeed at smut. This was epic smut!fail, despite my best intentions.

She followed him with her eyes, dark pools of silence in her face. It'd be unnerving except Clint had experience at that sort of thing. Natasha did that when she came in out of the cold and sat stiffly on a tall stool near his counter in his apartment. She'd watch him without ever letting him out of her sight. She had been trained and bred to danger and never letting anything in the room be more dangerous than she was. He had understood it.

Now, there was Wanda, slipping quietly through the Avengers Tower with her own confidence and ease and sorrow hanging about the corners of her frame. When he would pass through, generally loud and boisterous with others, she would go still and watchful, and he would feel the heaviness of her gaze until he was out of her sight.

He wondered sometimes if she hated him, for letting Pietro die, for being the reason Pietro died. They hadn't talked about it, and he never did the thing everyone else did where they walked up to her and said they were sorry. When his own brother died, he didn't want to hear it, and the one person who hadn't said that to him was Natasha. She had put her hand on his arm at the funeral and dug in her nails so he'd have something to feel to keep him from going numb, then taken him home afterward and said nothing until he was ready to say something himself.

So Clint wondered if Wanda hated him, if that's why her stare followed him everywhere, but he didn't ask and he didn't break the silence between them.

* * *

Wanda was learning things they didn't teach her at the facility. They taught her to use her miraculous powers, but they didn't teach her to kick and punch and block. Natasha and Steve were teaching her that, and Sam was teaching her to shoot.

She didn't ever say she wished that Clint would teach her. She watched him sometimes when he entered the range and handled guns or his bow with that same easy confidence. He would shoot and knock out bullseye after bullseye after bullseye.

Wanda liked learning hand-to-hand combat from Natasha and standard soldier training from Steve. She liked learning from the best.

* * *

Wanda soon learned that Clint was the one who stood watch overhead when the Avengers were fighting on a large scale. Though Rhodey and Sam both took to the air with breathtaking ease, though they were stronger than someone like Clint with his weathered features and simpler armor, he was the one with the keen gaze and watchful guard. He took to the high corners and edges, in the rooftops and shadows, bow at the ready to watch everyone's back but his own.

He became Hawkeye, and she became the Scarlet Witch. Natasha became the Black Widow. Steve became Captain America. War Machine and Falcon flew beside Vision, the strongest of them all.

She understood that, once, Black Widow watched his back and still did when they broke off for their own mission objectives, but there was no room for that here, now, in the epic encounters they were forced to endure as a team. The Black Widow was too human for that.

Scarlet power danced over her fingers, and she kept him in her sights. She could reach with her miraculous powers more quickly than another could fly to his aid.

Her brother died for this man. And that made him valuable.

* * *

Clint wondered if she'd thought he wouldn't notice. Maybe she was simply used to him ignoring her about the edges of his vision, studying him whenever he was in the room. He decided to stop treating her like a skittish young woman whose grief he'd had far too much to do with and do something about everything.

"You do that often?" he asked the next time they were both in the kitchen.

He was putting together a big sandwich. Wanda was raiding the leftovers from Steve's latest concoction. After Ultron, the Avengers had pulled in a little tighter, staying at the Tower more frequently, rather than merely treating it as a base when they got called in for a job.

She looked up, flickers of surprise in her face. She frowned. "Do what?"

It was almost a breath of fresh air sometimes, that she expressed herself so openly compared to the female friends he'd always had. But then, they were spies and Wanda was not.

He leaned back against the counter and shrugged. "Try to keep an eye on the lookout." He took a big bite of sandwich so she'd be more likely to answer than expect more explanation.

A series of expressions chased each other across her face. "We watched out for each other," she finally said.

Pietro. Clint set down his plate. He kept managing to walk into that one.

But she shook her head. "The others cannot. I can." A beat of silence. "It's my job."

The echoes of their first real conversation as allies felt heavy between them. He didn't know how to answer, so finally, he just nodded. "Okay."

* * *

Then it was—officially.

Her job that is.

She learned more and more in training simulations. Steve would come over and explain to her where they would be for a group exercise, how he preferred to use his people. Much of it, Wanda had already picked up from observation, but as he incorporated her into his thinking and strategies, not just his orders, she found she was able to do that job better.

"You talked to him, didn't you?" she asked, hovering behind the couch when Clint had on one of the silly TV shows he always dragged Sam or Natasha into watching with him.

"Who me?" Clint grinned. "Come, watch."

She hesitated, noted the characters on the screen, and shook her head. "No, thank you."

"Suit yourself."

So she did.

* * *

It broke something between them, to acknowledge each other on the field, professional bleeding into personal when Wanda moved to actually talking to him in the halls or common rooms. She wished him a good trip when he headed back to the farm to visit his brother's family. She smiled when he returned.

"Sunburned?"

"Hush, child." He pocketed his sunglasses and hefted his duffel on his way to his own suite. "Respect your elders."

"You're not that old," she protested, leaving aside that it was Pietro's favorite taunt for Clint in the brief time the two had known each other.

Clint just shot her a look. "And you're not that young?"

She bristled. "Of course not," she snapped, coldly.

He just shook his head as if the entire exchange were amiable. "Well, see you later." Then he went into his suite and closed the door.

Wanda spun on her heel and headed for the training courts where Natasha was.

* * *

Wanda was not Natasha. Wanda was not a child soldier once, stripped of humanity and love. Wanda was not his sister, however much he could come to love her.

Wanda was not Laura and the kids, loved and protected as they had been by someone he loved. He didn't care for Wanda because Pietro had loved her. If anything, he suspected that was why she seemed to care about what happened to him.

When Clint came home to the Avengers Tower from home, he was surprised at the warmth with which she greeted him.

"Let's see what you've learned."

In the next training exercise, he took the quiet corners, skulking places he knew she wouldn't look with the engrained instinct of years of sniping and covering Natasha.

Falcon shot into the sky and met Rhodey's suit to stop him. Natasha and Cap danced around each other on the ground.

Clint had his arrow ready. Wanda had her eyes on the places she knew he liked to lurk, discarding one after another as tactically inferior. He waited for her to find him with her eyes before he grinned and fired.

* * *

"Smug American."

He chuckled as he built her a sandwich and she griped at him from across the counter, arms crossed under her sour expression.

"Well, at least one of us has to keep you on your toes." He was the only one who had really presented either of the Maximoff twins with much of a problem one on one. He handed her the plate.

She eyed it with deep suspicion, having picked up somewhere that he didn't have good taste.

"Eat it. You'll like it."

"Hm." She nibbled on one corner speculatively.

"So I heard you were looking for a synagogue." Clint had been a little startled to catch that in the updates from Natasha. "Find one yet?"

Wanda shrugged. She took a proper bite of sandwich.

He couldn't really help the grin that caused or the annoyed glare she shot him for being smug again. She did smug well, and as far as he was concerned, she didn't actually have a lot of room to talk.

"I was just wondering," he finally brought the question around to the point, "how did you fall in with HYDRA?"

"Because I'm Jewish?" she asked. "Did you think we were loyal to them?" Curiosity, amusement, and disparagement mingled equally in her tone. "Sometimes we accept the gifts of our enemies."

And that was certainly something he could understand. "You used them." Natasha had done much the same in her way with many, all except the first. He couldn't say the same of himself.

Wanda cocked her head at him, curious lilt entering her voice. "Why did you ask me to be an Avenger after everything else?" She gestured vaguely. Her gaze fixed on his again.

"Told you. What you were before didn't matter."

"But why do you think that? Why didn't it matter to you?" she persisted.

It struck him then that she wasn't asking about why it didn't matter. She was asking why it didn't matter to him, personal question for personal question. Which meant she had the right to an answer.

It wasn't something he liked to talk about. He set down his own sandwich and braced his hands on the counter. Natasha had asked once too, why he believed it didn't matter the things she had done and the people she had been.

He thought about how best to condense his background into something palatable or concise enough to share, then shook his head. "Let's just say you're not the only one who's done terrible things or has regrets."

Her eyes were dark and unreadable, but he didn't feel judgment within them.

* * *

He was in and out, and Wanda was fine with that. Clint had a family to take care of, jobs on the side with Natasha that she was just as comfortable not knowing everything about, and a tendency to need space from people after awhile.

This was different. He had barely gotten back, and he was already gone.

"Where is Clint?" Wanda asked the person who might know.

He was missing. It was not merely the emptiness of his loud, laughing presence when gathered with other Avengers, the absence of his silent tread or arrows, or his way of sticking to the shadows and hidden places. He was gone. His equipment was gone. Wanda knew the things he took with him when he left.

Natasha shot her a weary look. "It was a bad mission."

A mission, separate from the Avengers then.

"Is he all right?"

Natasha looked at her, suddenly an unreadable blank. "No," she said. "You..." She paused. "Do you want to come with me?"

"Where?" Wanda made no effort to hide her surprise.

Natasha finished packing her own gear in a bag. "The farm. Pack lightly."

Wanda hesitated, then went to get her things.

* * *

Clint was sitting on the front porch step when they found him. Wanda closed the car door and glanced back when she didn't hear Natasha also getting out.

Natasha was on the phone. She signalled "Fury" and waved Wanda on.

Clint's gaze was heavy on her as she approached, taking in all of her but particularly... Wanda followed the eyeline. Her hands.

She felt a wash of cold anger. "Is it a lie when you say you trust me?"

They both knew what her hands were capable of and that those powers could technically be used to help him as much as harm, were she willing to do so.

He looked weary, worn out from some nameless trauma. His soft laugh held little humor. "Today, I don't trust anyone."

"Even your Natasha?" Wanda had seen the two of them, partners, like one mind in two bodies. It made a sharp ache in her chest. She'd had that too.

"Natasha lies to me," Clint said matter-of-factly. He shrugged. "But I know it when she does, so it's okay."

Wanda stared at him with a hot flash of disbelief. "And that is trust? Pietro never lied to me."

"And you never lied to him either?" The question was more disbelief of his own than curiosity.

"He was my brother."

Pained disgust flickered in Clint's eyes. "I had one of those." The bitterness in his tone leaked into the following smile. "I think I liked yours better."

Wanda didn't like the taste of the history in those words. She slowly raised her fingers to his cheek. He didn't watch the movement warily. He let her touch him, then leaned into it, and turned his head to brush her palm with his lips.

She stared at him for a moment. He matched her gaze. She leaned in and for the first time, they closed the space between them.

* * *

Laura welcomed them and the kids hugged Natasha hard. Clint introduced Wanda to Pietro's namesake.

"I think he likes you," Laura said with a smile when Nathaniel snuggled into Wanda's arms.

She hadn't held many babies before, and she liked the feeling.

Clint retreated early to his room, but after dinner, Natasha offered Laura to help clean up and shooed Wanda in the direction of the stairs.

"Second on the left."

"Shameless," Laura commented, swatting at Natasha with a dishtowel.

Clint didn't seem surprised to see her, just asked, "Sure you want to spend the night in here?"

She hadn't really thought through why Natasha sent her to this room or what it would mean, but she looked at this man who had asked her once if she was up for saving the world, willing to accept either answer at face value, and answered as she had then, without words.

She leaned up and kissed him.

He pulled her into the room and closed the door behind her.


End file.
